5 Things Every Author Must Do To Market A Bestseller

5 Things Every Author Must Do To Market A Bestseller

Every book is different. Different topic, different style, different writer, different audience. As a result, every successful book needs a different marketing plan.

However, while every successful marketing plan will look different, they are all comprised of the same composite parts. Every successful book marketing strategy is made of five pieces:

Organization

Research

Messaging

Coordination

Execution

Below, we’re going to break down each necessary part of your book marketing strategy, and how you can do it with Storiad.

1. How To Launch Your Campaign With Great Organization

Organization is one of those things you always plan on getting around to—later, once it’s really necessary.

With book marketing campaigns, if you don’t start off with a strong organizational system, you’re going to quickly find yourself buried under a mess of random text files, half-made press kits, response-less emails, and folders you can’t quite remember the name of.

As well as high-level strategy documents, so you can have your marketing roadmap committed to paper, so to speak.

Using a cloud storage tool is really a necessity if you want to be able to synchronize these files across all devices and location. Storiad integrates directly with Dropbox, the best cloud storage platform available, providing every Storiad author with a drag-and-drop interface within the Storiad platform that organizes your book marketing campaign in Dropbox for you.

2. The Secret To Effective Research Is In The Targeting

Research is deceptive. On the surface, it’s pretty easy—if you want to find websites that review books, you could just Google “Book reviews.”

However, once you pulled up those results, how would you filter out the review sites that were right for your book? How would you figure out who to pitch? Their contact information? How they like to be pitched?

That level of detail and targeting separates effective research from useless fact-finding, and you need a powerful platform to do it right.

If you have an unlimited budget, you can swing for the fences and buy a $12,000+ per year PR database like Muck Rack, but if you don’t have that sort of budget—and most of us don’t—you need Storiad’s Research platform.

The Storiad Research platform lets you sort through 28,000+ media contacts, targeting exactly the people you need to reach. For example, if you wrote a crime novel and wanted to find book reviewers who frequently cover crime, you could search the database and find these results:

The platform also allows you to create lists of targeted contacts, meaning you can compile a list of bloggers, a list of journalists, and a list of podcasts, and pitch them all differently if you wish.

3. How To Balance Personalized Messaging and Scale

The tricky part of publicity is this:

You know that the more people you pitch, the more chances you have to get coverage. This makes it tempting to send bulk pitches to as many people as possible—after all, the more seeds you plant, the more will grow, right?

At the same time, you know that personalized messages are the ones that actually get picked up. This makes it essential for you to personalize every pitch you send as much as possible.

So how do you balance this? You want to pitch as many people as possible, but writing that many pitches from scratch will take more time than you have to commit.

And what about your media assets? It costs a good chunk of change to hire a designer to create a media kit. Tailoring a new media kit to different journalists and book reviewers is going to soak up even more of your time and money.

Storiad fixes all of this. Let’s start with your press kit.

The Storiad ePressKit platform gives you a drag-and-drop interface for creating press kits, all hosted as websites on the Storiad server. You can quickly create a new press kit—and by quickly, we mean literally five minutes—for a new group of journalists without paying a dime extra:

Now that your press kits are out of the way, what about your pitches? How can you personalize all those emails at scale?

That’s where the Storiad Outreach platform comes in.

When you decide to send a message using the Storiad Outreach platform, you select a list of contacts to reach out to, meaning you are only ever pitching one group at a time.

The platform then allows you to select a template to use in your outreach, but it requires you to send each email individually—meaning you can quickly write a sentence or two of personalization for each contact, without writing entirely new emails:

This allows you to pitch targeted contacts with personalized emails and tailored press kits, all without sacrificing any time or money.

4. Coordination Is The Secret Sauce of Any Good Campaign

Publicity and marketing do not have neat, one-size-fits-all solutions—that’s why Storiad is a platform for authors to use, instead of a done-for-you book marketing service. Nowhere is this more true than in the coordination of your campaign.

So much of your campaign’s success will come down to how well you coordinate your efforts. Who are you networking with? How well are you scheduling your readings? Are you collaborating effectively with others?

Getting people to help you, and making the most out of the help you get, is the x-factor in your campaign.

While Storiad can’t teach you how to do this, it can make it as easy as possible with the following tools.

The Storiad Networking platform is a straightforward networking tool for Storiad authors. With every new author that joins Storiad, you gain a new contact and potential partner in your book marketing campaign. Asking for blurbs, endorsements, or just some retweets is incredibly easy with the platform.

But what about scheduling readings and coordinating a book tour? Storiad has you covered there as well.

Storiad’s Outreach platform now includes a Video Events scheduler, which allows you to schedule virtual readings—think of them as video group calls between you and all your readers—for free within the platform.

Storiad’s Video Events are a fantastic way to plan readings. There are no setup or travel fees, and all of your readers can join, regardless of their location.

5. Execution Is Down To You

Now, there is one thing the Storiad platform can’t do. Storiad can give you all the tools you need, but it cannot make you execute. That part is up to you.

However, Storiad can make it as easy as possible to execute, by giving you a tailored marketing plan and real-time analytics for you to gauge the efficacy of your efforts.

For starters, the Storiad Marketing Wizard is an easy questionnaire that will give you a bespoke, powerful marketing plan to guide the rest of your campaign:

Along with the marketing plan, Storiad also offers you various calculators to help you determine the worth of your book, setting a benchmark for the other analytics you’ll be seeing as an author—Kindle sales, brick-and-mortar sales, Amazon sales, etc.

With all of this together, the path forward is laid out for you with the Storiad platform. Like any tool, it’s down to you to use it effectively.

Luckily, you have access to plenty of support here at Storiad. Click the Chat icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen anytime to talk with our team directly—we’re always happy to help.